I'm excited to announce some big changes to our Lingua team. For the past few years, Paula Goes has been our multilingual editor, managing the relationship between Lingua teams and editorial, and also overseeing the Lingua Project. Mohamed ElGohary has been the Lingua Coordinator, with primary responsibility for running the day-to-day aspects of Lingua, and also tracking data, helping out on technical issues, and many other things.

Starting in May, Gohary will become the Lingua Director, taking over from Paula on overseeing the Lingua project overall. This includes managing the growth and sustainability of Lingua communities, working on a strategy for Lingua sites, editorial practices and capacities, training, establishing partnerships, editor recruitment, and managing statistics and data across all sites. It's a significant and important job for GV, and we're all very pleased to see Gohary grow into this role.

At the same time, Paula will be shifting the focus of her work to building the translation services that GV provides for our partners and other mission-related organizations, based on fair trade translation principles of reasonable rates for work for community members who are involved in providing these translations. Paula has been leading the effort at GV for translation partnerships and services for several years, working with partners such as Witness, MLDI, Refugees United and the Web We Want. This work has been valuable to the GV community and mission because it helps get information such as advocacy guides, relevant legal documents and policies, and our own writing into more languages.

Paula is increasingly focused on the question of fair income for translators, and also in helping Global Voices to build alternative revenue streams that benefit the community, and that will hopefully help us, as an organization, to be less dependent upon donor funding. Paula's work will include building a marketing and promotion strategy for our translation services, identifying partners we want to work with, and managing contracts and projects.

Paula and Gohary will both be sharing their thoughts about their respective new roles soon. For now, please join me in congratulating them!